As far as herbage crops in general are concerned, the market for all kinds of spices has developed and grown to such extend that the supply is unable to meet the demand in reasonable price, due to the high cost of manual labor needed in sorting harvested crops of various types like chives, green onion etc.
For many years many attempts have been made to minimize the need for manual labor in sorting of various types of vegetables and fruits. To date, there are some mechanized sorters which are practical, effective and efficient pertaining to grain crops, fruits or vegetables, but sorting of herbage crops is still performed by manual labor.
Lately a growing difficulty to market herbage crops has developed due to unavailability of manual labor. For example, the method of sorting chives to date is as follows: Chives arrive from the greenhouse to the packing-house in crates as bundled bunches placed one next to the other. Each bunch contains stalks in different lengths and conditions. Some are too short, curved and yellowish, others are infected, splintered, striped or having burned edges. In order to receive competitive good quality bunches having the required weight, the workers have to perform the following tasks: to cut manually the edges, to shake the bunch in order to get rid of the flawed ones, to sort manually the stalks and remove the damaged ones. (e.g. 100 gr. chives contain about 300 stalks). To weigh manually each bunch, add or lessen stalks in each bunch in order to receive the desired weight, to manually bundle each bunch and pack for delivery.
A highly trained worker is able to provide 15 kg finished and packed stalks bunches daily. The sorted crop weighs 30% of the raw stalks. 70% wastage results from the above described process and the over-weight deriving from manual weighing.
Until recently there were only two ways to feed stalks into compartments vertically to a moving conveyor belt: (1) Starting a work cycle by stopping the moving conveyor belt, hand feeding the products while the moving conveyor belt stands still, and once the compartments on the conveyor belt are loaded, restarting movement. (2) Starting a work cycle while synchronizing the feeding system to speed of the conveyor belt. Once the feeding system is disposed above the compartments on the moving conveyor belt, the products are disconnected from the feeding system into the compartments and the feeding system returns to point 0.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,018,674 to Morris disclosed a system for sorting tobacco leaf. In the system the leaves are carried on a horizontal endless belt conveyor past a sensing station, the method of delivering the leaves from a source to the conveyor comprising the steps of feeding within an enclosed housing vertically disposed above the conveyor a random stream of the leaves so as to fall perpendicularly to the conveyor deflecting the leaves in a plurality of selected paths, each intersecting a major portion of the perpendicularly falling stream within the housing transversely to the direction of movement of the conveyor before reaching the conveyor, each of the selected paths being inclined in a direction obliquely angular to the perpendicular direction of the falling stream, the direction of movement of the conveyor and the plane of the conveyor to cause the leaves within the falling stream to be deflected at different times and move relative to each other sequentially downwardly at angles to the direction of the vertical stream, the conveyor and the direction of movement of the conveyor and depositing the leaves on the conveyor in spaced orientation.
In high throughput, when products are tightly wrapped and in motion, performing cuts is not simple and is quite a technological challenge. The problem is increased, for example, when the stalk to be cut is one out of a tightly wrapped package in high motion, and it is necessary to avoid touching the nearby stalks. The technology exists but it is very expensive, complicated and not practical, when it comes to relatively cheap products, like herbage crops.